BRAINIAC OR MANIAC?

It's not like I'm obsessed with him, but apparently, Sam Altman is now after a cool 7 trillion dollars to make more powerful computer chips, to enable his AI to run the world more effectively, presumably from an extinct volcano somewhere in the Pacific.

Is it just me, or does anybody else think giving one person this much power is not guaranteed to have a favourable outcome for the majority?

Especially when that person has made utterances such as, "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies" *. Well, that's okay then. Let's just put him in charge of the nuclear button as well, shall we?

* Top 10 Sam Altman Quotes - BrainyQuote

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING DOBBER

Not a day goes by without Dobber* stumbling past our gate on his daily mission to secure free beer and fags**. The later in the day he appears, the more unsteady his gait, as being a deceptively careful planner, he clearly has a few cans of lager readied the night before so that, when he awakes, he can start the day with a liquid breakfast to ensure his blood alcohol content remains stable. More often than not, his first port of call is the hairdressing salon two doors away, where he will inevitably regale my stylist Gerson with an incoherent monologue and/or rant. Depending on how thin his patience has worn, Gerson will frequently proffer a few notes and coins and ask Dobber to visit the supermarket down the road on the corner to buy him something, anything, on the unspoken understanding that the change will be used to purchase some more cheap alcohol. Cue Dobber stumbling past our gate again, this time heading in the opposite direction with a renewed sense of purpose.

As the salon has irregular hours and is not always open, Dobber will sometimes make his way over the road to the opposite corner, where a tailor operates out of his garage. Lengthy negotiations tend to ensue, and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, a similar visit will be paid to the supermarket to buy the tailor a twelve-pack of beer, a couple of cans being busted out in recompense. It’s like watching the noble hunter-gatherer, fixated only on securing enough supplies to avoid starvation, or in Dobber’s case, a debilitating bout of delirium tremens.

Part of me can’t help but envy his lifestyle, debauched as it may seem. There is a beautiful simplicity to his existence. He has no need for mindfulness meditation, as his sole focus each and every day is how to continue his permanent state of inebriation and keep the nicotine pulsing around his system. He lives with his mother, a melancholy woman who, on the rare occasions she ventures out, sits in front of the house, presumably wondering where it all went wrong.

I should not suggest that Dobber is a complete freeloader. Recently, showing an unexpectedly entrepreneurial bent, he came weaving around the corner pushing a wheelbarrow. It wasn’t at all clear where he got it from, or indeed if he was authorised to take it, but he had the air of a man on a mission, willing to push a wheelbarrow from point A to point B in return for a guaranteed supply of the amber nectar. A while ago, when a removal van arrived with some of my brother-in-law’s furniture, which he’d asked to store at our house, as I was going up the staircase, I was surprised to pass Dobber on his way down, fortunately carrying a dining room chair rather than a more delicate, breakable item. Never one to miss an opportunity to provide manual services in the hope of an alcohol-enabling tip.

There is a price to be paid, of course. Dobber’s dental hygiene is nothing to write a ballad about, and he has been known to drunkenly abuse strangers in bars, with predictable results. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine that these two facts are related, that his almost complete lack of front teeth in part derives from multiple beatings dished out over the years. 

But on he goes, hobbling back and forth all day, every day, with an admirable laser-like focus. I just pray I don’t ever collapse and require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when he’s in the vicinity.

* British English. NB - not his real name

** British English

DARK THOUGHTS ABOUT SAM ALTMAN

 I can't imagine it is just me whose thoughts are not infrequently invaded by an overwhelming urge to fight Sam Altman. Of course he's not the only one responsible for the "AI revolution", but he bears more responsibility than most. He's the poster boy at the tech conferences, he's the one throwing casual suggestions around about how to deal with the upcoming economic and social meltdown that will be caused when AI comes for virtually everybody's jobs, particularly in the developing world. We're even supposed to care about which board Sam is sitting on, at which multi-billion dollar tech company. Poor Sam, my heart bleeds, as I'm busy going through bags of recycling on the street to see if I can find any aluminium cans to sell for scrap (not literally, but it's certainly on my list of backup plans).

I watched the brilliant movie Oppenheimer the other night, and I couldn't help thinking of Sam when the opening quotation from the Bhagavad Gita appeared: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

I am exaggerating, of course. I'm pretty sure Sam is one of those tech bods who does Ju Jitsu or kickboxing, and no doubt he would cane my flabby white ass. But the way AI has decimated and continues to decimate the industry I currently work in, translation, makes it hard to feel any affection for Sam, or any sympathy for his, no doubt inconvenient, corporate bed-hopping.

It started in April 2023. Roughly six months on from the launch of ChatGPT (I presume GPT stands for Gunky Pissy Toilet), the flow of work to my small but invariably humming translation company started to slow. In fact, it didn't just slow, it fell off a cliff. The graph above shows the quantity, but doesn't reflect the quality, of the jobs I received in 2023. From long annual reports and project briefs, the kind of dry, long-winded business documents that provided the bulk of my income, I was now reproducing a birth certificate here, a death certificate there (oh, the irony), the odd driving licence - documents that need the kind of complex formatting that AI (so far) is incapable of recreating.

My income has plummeted accordingly. Almost overnight. At one point, all my clients seemed to disappear at the same time, as if there had been another mass extinction event and I hadn't been paying attention. 

My largest client, a translation company based in Portugal, themselves got into trouble and consequently couldn't pay me. Out of the blue, I was left without 90% of my income for 6 weeks in the middle of the year, and then it happened again towards the end of the year. Cue two massively expensive bank loans (high interest rates mean Brazil is one of the best countries in the world if you have investments, but one of the very worst if you need to borrow), the repayments on which have only increased my outgoings at a time when my income is constantly shrinking. 

"Go back to TEFL!" I hear you cry, as not only my guitar gently weeps. Even that is not necessarily the answer, as I've calculated that, even if I could magic up throngs of eager students, I would have to teach for about 80 hours a week to make ends meet; enough to make a grown man simper - imagine me. 

Some of these tech leaders have suggested a Universal Basic Income for those, like me, whose occupations have suddenly been nuked. All very well in the rich countries, but I live in Brazil, where there are 67.8 million poor and 12.7 million extremely poor, according to recent figures from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Does anyone really expect the Government to put its hand in its pocket and give money to someone like me?

I have spent the last year on an increasingly frenzied dash around YouTube in an increasingly desperate attempt to find a side-hustle I can start today, for nothing, and that will earn me several hundred k a year. I am the modern-day snake oil salesmen's delight, ramping up traffic on my relentless quest for a future. 

So yes, I have to admit to having dark thoughts about fighting Sam Altman. Well, not exactly fighting him, probably just running up behind him and punching him in the back of the head.

Or summat.

Disclaimer: I am joking.